Social Site’s New Friends Are Athletes

Madison Avenue has long seen the value of aligning with sports teams,
and over the years has been reaching further down the athletic food
chain: first professional, then college, and more recently high school.
Takkle, a social-networking site for high school athletes, is partially
owned by Sports Illustrated. With WePlay, advertisers will have the
chance to go even younger.~A

Social Site’s New Friends Are Athletes – New York TimesLate last year, Pamela Firestone, the mother of Tony Parker, the San Antonio Spurs point guard, went rooting through her home in Paris and dug up a VHS tape of a 9-year-old Tony on a Parisian basketball court with his two brothers.

“O.K., let’s start,” the future N.B.A. star says in French. “It’s going to be the Chicago Bulls versus the San Antonio Spurs.”

In most families such artifacts are merely heirlooms, their value
measured in memories. For the Hollywood talent agency Creative Artists
Agency and the hedge fund Pequot Capital, these are assets to be
exploited.